I'm not confident that Congress will support the mortgage refinancing thing, so we may as well direct him to do something he can do without them.

....

I would love for someone to refinance every home mortgage to a low fixed rate, including my own which is presently at a fixed 4.5%, but the constitution prevents a president from acting unilaterally without the express and sustained support of congress.

It will be a public charter school, open to all but necessarily limited to a fixed number of students each year.

Admission will be by lottery but certain demographics will need to be met to ensure that under-served students are not prevented from attending.

It will use ADA for funding, just like the traditional local schools that would otherwise have to take the students my school will gladly serve.

It will be staffed by members of the teachers union.

The student population served will be 50% or greater at risk of failure.

We will encourage enrollment of students with IEPs (students with identified learning challenges) and make sure that we have at least the same proportion of these as the local traditional public schools, and possibly a higher proportion.

We will NOT accept federal Title I funds.

Students will have to meet state expectations before graduation.

It will be a small learning community with just one or two teachers in its first year, self-contained classrooms, thematic instruction.

Students will stay with the same teacher or teachers from ninth grade through graduation.

The school will focus on environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

The school will probably open in Fall, 2013, because these things take time.

So there's a shitload of things FDR was able to do that make us all proud, and a lot of us are sayin', WTF Obama???

But thinking back to basic civics (as it's hard to understand how sickeningly dirty and complex government works, or doesn't work), we have to remember that the president can't do much with a hostile congress. Somehow people still hold unrealistically high expectations, IMHO.

I'm not sure about the numbers in this OP: $107,900 would buy about 20-25 kW system, not nearly enough to offset the Whitehouse by 81% I suspect.

In any case, this is great news and I hope he goes for it.

Now about those Carter "solar panels":

Carter had solar thermal water heating panels, not photovoltaic, just to correct any misunderstandings about the panels.

Lot's of solar on the whitehouse grounds today:

Water heating panels:

Solar PV modules:

Solar at the White House

Solar energy has returned to the White House complex. While the White House has kept pretty quiet about it, three solar installations were completed last summer on White House buildings and are now generating renewable power and hot water. Here are the details:Solar hot water panels on roofWhite House cabana showing flush-mount solar water heating system.Installing the solar panelsPhotos: Evergreen Solar, Inc.

Installing PV panels on a National Park Service maintenance building at the White House.

In July and August, three solar energy systems, designed by Steven Strong of Solar Design Associates in Harvard, Massachusetts, were installed on two separate White House buildings. The first of these, a large 8.75 peak-kilowatt photovoltaic (PV) system, was installed on the National Park Service maintenance building located in the southwest corner of the 16-acre (6.5 ha) White House grounds. This system consists of 167 EC-51 PV modules, each rated at 51 watts, manufactured by Evergreen Solar of Marlboro, Massachusetts. Three 2,500-watt Sunny Boy inverters, provided by SMA Americas (a division of the German manufacturer SMA), convert this DC electricity into AC power that is fed into the White House electricity grid.

On the same building, a residential-scale solar water heating system was installed to provide hot water for landscape maintenance personnel. This system is comprised of two 4' x 8' (1.2 x 2.4 m) flat-plate collectors made by SunEarth, Inc., of Ontario, California. These panels were installed using a typical stand-off mount in a drain-back configuration (for more on solar water heating.

The third installation is a five-panel, building-integrated solar hot water system on the White House cabana next to the presidential pool and spa. This system is integrated into a terne-coated, standing-seam copper roof. The inset design of the panels provides a relatively flush profile (see photo). Hot water produced by this system heats a hot tub and shower, with any extra energy going into the outdoor pool. The absorber plates for these panels were made by SunEarth, but the rest of the system was site-manufactured for better integration with the roof.

While nobody there is happy, or proud, neither does anyone I've spoken with have the idiot streak that would blame the administration for this.

Union busting LOL. The school had to choose from four reform models:

...Weingarten said the local school superintendent abruptly halted negotiations with the local teachers' union. Weingarten said she personally appealed to Rhode Island's new education commissioner, Deborah Gist, to restart talks but was rebuffed.

The shake-up at Central Falls High School came after Gist identified it as among the worst 5 percent in the state. She ordered local school officials to pick from one of four reform models, including mass firings.

Superintendent Frances Gallo said she initially wanted teachers to agree to changes including a longer school day, offering more tutoring and receiving extra training over the summer. She offered the teachers more pay for some, but not all, of the changes.

Gallo said she resorted to firings when talks with the teachers' union broke down....

States, Districts Must Pick From Four Models for Grants to Fix Lowest-Performing Schools

December 4, 2009

-snip-

To get their money, states must target schools that rank in the bottom 5 percent in student achievement. In one change from the proposed regulations, the definition of lowest-achieving schools has been expanded to include high schools with graduation rates below 60 percent for a “number of years.”

The money will flow to states based on the Title I formula for aid to disadvantaged students, but states will award the money competitively to districts.

School districts must agree to one of four turnaround models: closing the school and sending students to higher-achieving ones; turning it around by replacing the principal and most of the staff; “restarting” the school by turning it over to a charter- or education-management organization; or implementing a mandatory basket of strategies labeled “transformation.”

During a 30-day public-review period for the proposed regulations, 180 comments were submitted, many of them critical of what was described as highly prescriptive reforms from the federal government. Critics said the models might not work in communities where teacher and principal shortages exist, where teachers’ union contracts pose barriers, or where closing an entire school isn’t feasible.

In preemptive defense of the plan lets keep in mind that schools don't HAVE to try to get these grants.I think that the fourth option, "implementing a basket list of strategies", creates a lot of opportunities for schools that don't wish to apply the other three.

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